


Inglorious Avengers

by LadyLustful



Series: Inglorious Avengers [1]
Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Action & Romance, Alternate Universe - World War II, Angst and Feels, Black Humor, Blood and Gore, Candy, Coming Untouched, Coming of Age, Crack Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, Cuddling & Snuggling, Erik has Issues, Erik is a Sweetheart, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Historical References, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Kissing, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Marvel Cameos, Mood Whiplash, Nazi Hunter Erik Lehnsherr, Poor Erik, Self-Indulgent, Slow Romance, Starvation recovery, Teen Romance, Torture, but geez they have half a beer, but you already knew that from history, cruelty to Nazis, dark Kitty Pryde, oh boy the mood whiplash, spoiler: Hitler dies and there is much rejoicing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:26:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25558810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLustful/pseuds/LadyLustful
Summary: Kitty joins the Women's Army Corps because she wants to put a stop to her people being murdered  overseas. Finding - and falling for - a half-starved boy with ice-blue eyes and shark grin isn't in the plan.Or: Kitty kills nazis because it's the right thing and she's pissed, Max kills nazis and eats m&ms because he deserves happiness, Warpath kills nazis and complains about movies because Native American representation isn't a thing yet exactly, Creed  kills nazis and runs his ugly maw because that's what he does.Rated for violence against nazis and Sabretooth's potty mouth.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/James Proudstar, Erik Lehnsherr/Kitty Pryde, James Proudstar/Kitty Pryde
Series: Inglorious Avengers [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1873849
Comments: 11
Kudos: 4





	1. Allied Forces

**Author's Note:**

> Erik is called Max-Erich Eisenhardt, usually Max for short although Erik or Max-Erich will come up.

Kathleen Pryde enlists in the WAC at age 15, saying she is 18. She cannot stand by idly while her people are being mass-murdered overseas. James Proudstar enlists because getting paid to kill evil people beats the hell out of staying home in nowhere, Arizona, even if the pay is shitty, and because his brother has enlisted and James would follow John into hell itself. John dies storming the beaches of Normandy. James lives. Max they find along the way, a half-starved kid of Kitty's real age with bones as fine as twigs shining through his skin and all the rage of hell burning in his blue eyes.

Max proclaims undying love to Kitty with the first bite of terrible field-ration stew and James jokes:  
„Ya sell yer heart too easily, pal. Least wait till she feeds you her own ghastly cooking, not Uncle Sam's.”  
„I happen to be an excellent cook, James,” Kitty fires back fondly.  
„Sure ya are, corporal,” he fires back. They long since don't use rank for anything but teasing between them, two kids stuck together in the hell of war for what seems like ages, closest of their ragtag but tighly-knit little unit. „All-round overachiever.”  
  


They bring him back to the unit, and Creed asks: „What th'ell didja bring 'im back fer, lil' rat's too skinny fer even a snack?” and Logan slaps the back of Creed's head resoundingly, a maneuver only possible because Creed's sitting down, giant hairy frame hunched over a gutted rifle, „Can it, bub.”  
„We need a translator”, says James. Their last translator, the quiet seminar-student Wagner, was shipped home with a wound that only miraculously did not kill him – expected to make a full recovery, but unfit for duty for the next several months. „And Max has a personal investment in killing Nazis.”

Max has a nightmare that night and Kitty shares her M&Ms, that may or may not have been won at cards off Private Lee from the quartermaster's office, with him, confiding: „These little things are aspirin for the soul. They may not cure it, but they make it feel better.”

Max gets Creed's respect two weeks later, when they are interrogating a captured SS grunt, and he not only does not lose his stomach at what passes as Creed's idea of interrogation, but sits chewing on a Logan bar. He is the only one in the unit who not only will eat them but rather likes them, and this means he has a seemingly inexhaustible supply. The others, except Rogers, who is a freak that way, joke that the bars are inedible the same way Logan is unkillable – a fact proven since the soldier got a machine gun fired point blank at him, healed the gaping hole in his chest, and got up more pissed off than anything.  
„I wanna eatta Logan somethin', I'm just gonna shove my tongue up Jimmy's ass, sure tastes better”, Creed had professed, loudly, until Cap chewed him out thoroughly for „I couldn't care less who you sleep with or want to, but please keep your language and conversation topics minimally appropriate, especially with a lady present.”  
Kitty had honestly been quietly amused by the whole thing, more than anything, but Cap's concern with decorum was heartwarming.  
Creed is almost ready to give up and waste the stupid sack of meat by the time Max stands up and quietly says something in German, his voice rising with each sentence until his diction resembles a Shakesperean actor on stage, detailing matter-of-factly... something, until the grunt cries out and starts spilling his pitiful secrets.  
„What didja tell him, kid?”, asks Creed, secretly impressed.  
„I asked how long he thought we could draw out out strangling him if we took our time, and offered my suggestion of the answer with a biological explanation.”  
„Cool.”

They are a little bunch of weirdoes, their ragtag crack team. Logan can get hit by anything and get back up; so can Creed, but he is also insane enough not to duck; both also come with claws of different varieties. Rogers is a government experiment of some sort, moves and heals faster than any normal man and can lift a truck which he demonstrates with pleasure; Barnes and Proudstar are similar, although Proudstar was born with this the way Barnes and Rogers weren't. Wagner, their previous translator, had apparently been a teleporter – still was, thanks to Major Strange, a surgeon who apparently worked magic, but had been strictly prohibited to use his power or do anything else strenuous until he healed, which he told them in a brief letter to Logan, which also included a solemn promise to pray for them to Saint Susan, Saint Valentine, and Saint Jude, for they were the most difficult, insane, and impossible people he had ever loved. Pryde could neither heal nor teleport, but did something that made her able to avoid bullets and shrapnel and get through obstacles as if they weren't there. And Max himself discovered, as his strength returned with regular meals and a marginally more secure environment, that he could move metal, although he was still uncertain of his new power. They called themselves the Avengers, and they cut through the German forces like a knife through butter.

„I'm older today than John will ever be,” Proudstar confesses one night as they keep watch. „Nineteen years, two months, twenty days. John... was my older brother. He was like me. Anything a normal human can do, he was faster, stronger, better, more lethal. He thought he was immortal, too. But he wasn't. He died like a hero, serving a country he hated. I miss him.”  
„I miss Ruthie. My sister. She was 13. Got sick when we were on the run. So did I but I made it. She didn't. I couldn't even bury her.”  
And then, ridiculously, Max is hugging him, awkward, a skin-and-bones kid in fatigues that were made to fit someone Pryde's size and still hang loose around his frame. James isn't used to the affection of strangers, but it feels nice, heartfelt and Max probably needs it more than he does. He hugs back, holding on for a long time.

Kitty doesn't know when, but Max must have put on at least ten pounds since they got him. He's still painfully thin but is starting to look like a rather handsome boy rather than than something that might fall to pieces if so much as breathed on wrong, skin pink rather than bone-white beneath his freckles, his hair, redder by several shades than her own chestnut, growing with a brushed-copper sheen, his demeanour less weary and terrified and more confident. 

Parker, that string bean of a war correspondent that's twenty-something with a wife and baby back home but looks all of twelve, snaps a photo of them: Kitty with the Hollywood-star waves that, they learned at some point of roughing it in a war zone she theoretically shouldn't be in, grew naturally that way but frizzed like hell in the rain, Max haggard but grinning like a shark that smelled lunch, James dark-haired and dark-eyed, almost smiling.

They sleep together when they are camping. It's wildly improper, of course, but nights are cold, even in summer, Max is - was, at the start – so skinny he was cold constantly, so skinny he would probably die if he caught pneumonia, and Kitty thinks cuddling through four layers of fabric is vastly preferable to risking him dying. Creed had caught them in a mildly embarrassing position once, Max's pale, freckled face pillowed on her drab-clad breasts, and she had almost blushed before remembering it was Creed, who was commonly thought to have no sense, less manners, and even less shame, and shaped the words with her lips: „Don't you dare say anything, I know what you talk about doing to Logan. Honestly, just fuck off. Private.” She outranks Creed, mostly due to the blonde giant's tendency to fight, steal, gamble ourageously, run illegal whiskey, mouth off extremely colourfully to officers and otherwise court demotions and brig time, but rubbing in the fact that he got his rank busted again within a week of earning it can't hurt. Once she overheard him calling her „a piece a' cunt with balls” which might have been supposed to be a compliment, but she's never going to let him live it down if they both live to a thousand. Sometimes – usually – James will quietly lie down on Max's other side, giving for an excuse how the nights are cold in the desert but they aren't this humid.  
Max has always has nightmares, cold, ghastly memories mixed with absurd but revolting scenarios his mind brewed up, but now, sometimes his dreams are good too. Sometimes he dreams about the warm, loving touch of a woman, or a man, or the things that he saw people doing sometimes - vaguely, for vaguely he saw them – but the general idea is unmistakable. First time that happens, he wakes up wet and crusty and mortified, until James gets that fit of quiet laughter under control and explains what happened, that it's normal, and that he would need to scrub his clothes with cold water like they did with bloodstains.

Max finds – steals - a Vinnetou book somewhere, in the original German, and reads mostly ignored until Kitty asks him what it's about.  
„It's about love and justice, and faith, I suppose. About two men, true companions, who travel the wild west fighting injustice. Charlie, Old Shatterhand, is stronger than anyone, and Vinnetou, the chief of the Apaches, is... perfection. I think there is too much evil in the world for one man to punch out, even if Captain Rogers does try very hard, but it's nice to dream of good winning for once.”  
„We will win, Max. We are winning.”  
„You know, James kind of reminds me of Vinnetou.”  
„Because he's an Indian?”  
„Because he's a stunningly pretty one with a kinder heart than almost anyone and a streak of righteous bloodthirstiness.”  
„Don't let him... on the other hand, do let him hear it. I want to see our very own Apache blush.”

„Blood and honor,” says Max matter-of-factly, and pops a piece of the candy he keeps trading his cigarettes for in his mouth. It makes him look younger than he really is, as does the maniacal grin, and the rolled-up sleeves over skinny arms, and he is told the effect is terrifying. „As far as I know, you Nazis have no honor. You're not going to have blood either, by the time we're finished with you. Or skin, or teeth, or fingernails, or fingers for that matter. No guts or balls, literal to go with the metaphorical. But not too soon I think. Victor doesn't get to torture people as often as he would like, and he likes to draw it out when he can.”  
The Nazi tells him everything.  
„ _Vielen dank._ Have fun, Victor.”  
He savours the taste of chocolate, the screams of the dying man, and thinks his broken heart almost might start to mend.


	2. Wunderwaffe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wunderwaffe - "wonder weapon", an all-powerful weapon invented by Nazi propaganda that was supposed to turn the tides of the war and ensure German victory.

They make good time into Nazi-controlled territory, tearing through smaller units – literally, in the case of Creed, who likes big heavy guns that leave a big gory mess, but prefers getting up close and personal to make a big gory mess with his claws. Proudstar, in a rare moment of humor, joked about how the Nazis will „Naht-see” them coming, and it's certainly true. Two miles outside a town only Max can pronounce, a soldier escapes their ambush but goes running straight into Max, who calls the man's dagger to his hand, puts it through his heart, and calls it back before the soldier hits the ground.  
It's a good dagger, strong German steel and sharp edge, and the right lenght and heft to wield comfortably. Too good for the symbols adorning it, or the man who carried it, or the uses it was probably put to. But a flicker of Max's power erases the symbols, and carves „VENGEANCE” instead, in meticulously even block letters, and he soon puts it to better use. Next Nazi patrol they see finds itself slaughtered by a floating knife and their own guns and Victor bitches about Max stealing his fun for three days.

They are cruel to the Germans. Creed's the worst, because he is a sadist who enjoys killing the way an inveterate pervert enjoys sex. In civilian life, he would have been a serial killer, locked up deep in max-sec or killed trying to escape. Cap's the kindest, but that only means he kills quickly, efficently and without enjoyment. Max is the second worst, cruel with the cruelty of a broken-hearted child out for vengeance, fascinated with torture the way only a teenager can be with something new and repulsively beautiful. Barnes, too, is viciously vindictive, if less so, having been apparently captured and tortured earlier and paying that torture back with violent, painful death. Pryde isn't cruel, but she is ruthlessly pragmatic, and her idea of ruthlessness is close to another man's idea of cruelty. Several days before they found Max, she had phased into a panzer, thrown a hand grenade inside, then smiled watching the explosion. Proudstar and Logan just like to inflict violence on the deserving.

Max dreams about sucking James off about that time. He blames the fact that he saw Barnes and Cap doing it, in a quiet moment of downtime, Cap pushing down Bucky's head with a mixture of hunger and tenderness, and the fact he's sleeping so close to the Apache he can smell him, feel the solid warmth of his body in sleep. And James is a beautiful man – not just in face and body but in character and his quietly sarcastic intelligence. So, it's not surprising at all he dreams of James's gentle hand in his hair, James's quiet voice urging him on, James's scent in his nose. And if he wakes up sticky again, well, he has been reliably told it's a part of growing up.  
He dreams about Kitty too, as much as he will never admit it. He has seen her washing in frigid streams, felt her next to him when they sleep. He has no doubt about how her naked body looks, how it would feel under his hands. In waking, he wouldn't dare envision it, worried about the morality of it, but his dreaming self has no such qualms.

Sometime Proudstar asks him what he is reading and he tells him about the stunningly beautiful Apache and the German white boy who loved him, and the way they fight the myriad cruelties and injustice of the wild west, but the way he tells it, it's a story of comraderie and fascination, of friendship and desire, of a love forbidden but triumphant.  
„I know it's anything but true but it's a good story,” he finishes. „It would make a good movie.”  
„I kind of hate movies.”  
„Why?”  
„Mostly cause there are movies about us but not by us. They don't tell what it's like to be Apache.”  
„And what's it like?”  
„Hard. But I wouldn't exchange it for anything.”  
„I would give almost anything not to be German, to have been born somewhere else.”  
„I think I understand.”  
  
  


Max-Erich finds his own way of dealing with panzers. He never knew it would work, but when he sees the crosses on the camouflaged flanks, feels the magnetic charge of the rich steel armor, he feels a surge of the rage and roiling hurt that rests deep inside him, flaring up every times he runs into Nazis, a surge of the power that connects him with the world around, from the earths molten, compressed core deep beneath his feet to the needle in the sewing kit in Kitty’s pocket, and they are one, coming together and he has in him the power to destroy and the righteous wrath, as though he had been lent the sword of an avenging angel, and when he clenches his fist he is a giant large enough to hold the Panther in his hand and crumple it into a useless ball like an empty wrapper, or a letter not worth the time wasted on reading it. He feels the steel buckle and bend, knows the lives inside are extinguished in a heartbeat, though no less gruesomely for it, mashed into a pulp that cannot be separated from the vehicle meant to protect them.   
“Looks like we stole us a Wunderwaffe”, comments Creed, “and it looks like a skinny shrimp of a Jew child.”   
“Max is a person, Victor, probably more than you are, since he appears to care for something besides destruction, regardless of his talent for it.”   
“Hey I care fer chow and booze and fuckin’. That ain’t only destruction.”   
“Of course you do. Point is, Max is a man, not a thing. Respect him.” 

Creed's respect takes the form of a crate of stolen beer. Rogers frowns on theft and alcohol both, but he is also a realist, and they've won a minor victory, a bunker crushed, a town liberated, another stretch of road to Berlin behind them. This, and Max-Erich's new skill, all calls for celebration. Max and Kitty split a bottle between them, the two of them weighing combined about as much as Cap does and technically underage, frowning at the bitter taste as they pass it back and forth, sitting pressed together as dusk falls.  
And at some point, Max asks the question that's been plaguing him since his survival of the war became apparently feasible:  
„You think we can ever live normally after this? The world I was born in, the one my whole family lived in, has ended, and this war will not last for ever either. I've been a child, a fugitive and a killer, and I'm supposed to know how to be a man?”  
But it's Proudstar who answers from the nearby darkness, with that quiet little smile of his that touches his eyes more than his lips, and seems at once melancholy and amused:  
„Worlds as we know it tend to end pretty frequently. You get handed a new, more confusing one, and try to live in it. And that's all you can do, really.”


	3. Si Vis Pacem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This in indulgent feel-good gory shmoop written by a survivor's bisexual grandkid in a country slowly being overrun by knockoff-brand nazis. I just want to Aldo Raine destruction on anyone that threatens people for ethnicity, religion, sexuality or other things that make the world beautifully interesting.

It's late spring, almost summer in the burnt ruins of Berlin. The Nazis are without a hope to win now, crushed between the Soviets in the East and the Allies in the West, but fighting no less fiercely for it. The destroyed city is as much of an obstacle to the invaders as for the defenders, the front almost stopped as crumbling house after pile of rubble is fought for.

Kitty and Max both look Aryan enough, very young and a little haggard, and they are wearing civilian clothes, sufficiently scruffy for the inhabitants of a city that’s been bombed, shelled, and is currently being stormed, Kitty in dress with flowers and stains and rips and Max in a drab shirt that saw entire years of better days. With Max’s native-speaker command of German and his stone-cold brilliant bluff under pressure, it’s enough to get through the city not so much unnoticed, as considered its own fleeing, terrified children. Underneath, they are anything but. They find a man who seems to be high-ranked enough in the SS to know where the bunker is, mildly paranoid with exhaustion as he tries to fight or sneak his way back to his men, and Kitty pulls him through a wall into an empty, probably unstable cellar.

The Sturmfuhrer thanks them profusely for them apparent rescue, mentioning he has children around their age, before Max takes a penknife to him, testing out almost all the tools before the man breaks and spills the secret with ugly sobs. They leave him there, still breathing because the war is about to end and at this point it’s his own problem whether he bites it there or lives to see the inside of a prison.

It’s anticlimatic. They phase through meters of earth and a concrete wall, seeing a small man with an ugly mustache and a demeanour, despite his probably extensive efforts, best descibed as pathetic. It seems incredible this is the one who caused all that death and damage and suffering, the one who rallied and commanded the armies they fought for the past months. Up close he seems insane in the same way a lot of Nazis are recently, weary and scared and angry and floating fast further away from the reality he wasn't really attached to at the start.  
„I told you, do not disturb me unless you have news of victory... Who are you?”  
„I'm nobody. Just a Jewish girl from Deerfield, Illinois who joined the Women's Army Corps under false pretences and crossed an ocean to stop my people from being mass-murdered. And he is a Jewish kid from _Germany_. You hurt him more than you could ever hope to hurt me. And for that, you're going to die. Max?”  
Max translates.  
„And she's right,” he adds. „About everything.”  
Hitlers gun makes it's way to his mouth, the trigger twitches. _Bang_. The greatest evil of the modern day, dispatched efficiently and unceremoniously by two teenage soldiers who vanish through a wall, holding hands.

The first time Kitty kisses Max for real is the day the war ends, against a backdrop of bombed-out Berlin. And it's not the best kiss, but it's long, and they are both are quick learners and by the time it ends, she'd say it was pretty excellent.  
Creed whistles.  
„Hell, that was a smacker ter end all smackers if there fuckin' ever was one.”  
And then, she tunes out Creed, but turns and kisses James in turn.  
„Well how boutta a kiss fer me?” Creed inquires before a blonde nurse with the nametag of Hale grabs his non-regulation messy mane of hair, pulls, making him bend down almost in half to kiss her before picking her up by the bum for more convenient kissing.

Life is full of little defeats and victories but this is the greatest victory of their lifetimes.


End file.
